Authors: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Imagine what the mother felt. The commandant tapped his finger on the glass. Or the father. Imagine the shrieks.
What is that thing?
He shook his head and drank his rice wine, its color that of thin milk. I licked my lips, and while the scratching of my dessicated tongue on my brittle lips was loud in my ears, the commandant did not notice. We could have just shot all these prisoners, he said. Your friend Bon, for example. A Phoenix Program assassin deserves the firing squad. Protecting him and excusing him as you do reflects poorly on your character and judgment. But the commissar is merciful and believes anyone can be rehabilitated, even when they and their American masters killed anyone they wanted. In contrast to the Americans and their puppets, our revolution has shown generosity by giving them this chance for redemption through labor. Many of these so-called leaders never worked a day on a farm. How do you lead an agricultural society into the future with no idea of the peasant’s life? Without bothering to drape the cloth over the jar again, he poured himself another drink. Lack of understanding is the only way to characterize how some prisoners think they’re being poorly fed. Of course I know they suffer. But we all suffered. We all must suffer still. The country is healing, and that takes longer than the war itself. But these prisoners focus only on their own suffering. They ignore what our side went through. I can’t get them to understand that they get more calories per day than the revolutionary soldier during the war, more than the peasants forced into refugee camps. They believe they are being victimized here, instead of being reeducated. This obstinacy shows how much reeducation they still need. As recalcitrant as you are, you are still far ahead of them. Here I agree with the commissar about the state of your reeducation. I was just talking about you with
him
the other day. He’s remarkably tolerant of you. He didn’t even object to being called the faceless man. No, I understand, you are not mocking him, merely describing the obvious, but he’s quite sensitive about his . . . condition. Wouldn’t you be? He wants to meet you this evening. That’s quite an honor. No prisoner has ever met him personally, not that you are a prisoner. He wants to clarify a few issues with you.
What issues? I said. We both looked at my manuscript, its leaves neatly stacked on his bamboo table and pinned down by a small rock, all 295 pages written by the light of a wick floating in a cup of oil. The commandant tapped my pages with a middle finger, its tip cut off. What issues? he said. Where to begin? Ah, dinner. A guard was at the door with a bamboo tray, a boy, his skin a sickly shade of yellow. Whether they were guards or prisoners, most men in the camp were this shade of yellow, or else a sickly, rotten shade of green, or a sickly, deathly shade of gray, a color palette resulting from tropical illnesses and a calamitous diet. What is it? said the commandant. Wood pigeon, manioc soup, stir-fried cabbage, and rice, sir. The wood pigeon’s roasted haunches and breast made me salivate, as my usual ration was boiled manioc. Even when starving, I had to force the manioc down my gullet, where it cemented itself against the walls of my stomach, laughing at my attempts to digest it. Subsisting on a diet of manioc not only was culinarily unpleasant, it was also no fun from a gastroenterological perspective, resulting in either a painfully solid brick or its highly explosive liquid opposite. As a consequence, the inflamed piranha of one’s anus was always gnawing at one’s posterior. I tried desperately to time my bowel movements, knowing a guard would fetch the ammo box reserved for that purpose at 0800 hours, but the snarled firehose of my bowels erupted at will, oftentimes right after the guard returned with the emptied can. Liquids and solids then fermented for most of the night and day, a vile mixture rusting through the ammo box. But I had no right to complain, as my baby-faced guard told me. No one’s picking up my shit every day, he said, peering at me through the slot in my iron door. But you’re being waited on hand and foot, short of someone wiping your ass. What do you say to that?
Thank you, sir. I could not call the guards “comrade,” the commandant demanding that I keep my history a secret, lest it be leaked. The commissar orders this for your own protection, the commandant had told me. The inmates will kill you if they know your secret. The only men who knew my secret were the commissar and the commandant, for whom I had developed feline feelings of both dependency and resentment. He was the one making me rewrite my confession with repeated strokes of his blue pencil. But what was I confessing to? I had done nothing wrong, except for being Westernized. Nevertheless, the commandant was right. I was recalcitrant, for I could have shortened my unwanted stay by writing what he wanted me to write.
Long live the Party and the State. Follow Ho Chi Minh’s glorious example. Let’s build a beautiful and perfect society!
I believed in these slogans, but I could not bring myself to write them. I could say that I was contaminated by the West, but I could not inscribe that on paper. It seemed as much of a crime to commit a cliché to paper as to kill a man, an act I had acknowledged rather than confessed, for killing Sonny and the crapulent major were not crimes in the commandant’s eyes. But having nevertheless acknowledged what some might see as crimes, I could not then compound those deeds through my description of them.
My resistance to the appropriate confessional style irritated the commandant, as he resumed telling me over dinner. You southerners had it too good for too long, he said. You took beefsteak for granted, while we northerners lived on starvation rations. We’ve been purged of fat and bourgeois inclinations, but you, no matter how many times you’ve rewritten your confession, cannot eradicate those inclinations. Your confession is full of moral weaknesses, individual selfishness, and Christian superstition. You exhibit no sense of collectivity, no belief in the science of history. You show no need to sacrifice yourself in the cause of rescuing the nation and serving the people. Another of To Huu’s verses is appropriate here:
I’m a son of tens of thousands of families
A younger brother of tens of thousands of withered lives
A big brother to tens of thousands of little children
Who are homeless and live in constant hunger
Compared to To Huu, you are a communist only in name. In practice, you are a bourgeois intellectual. I’m not blaming you. It’s difficult to escape one’s class and one’s birth, and you are corrupted in both respects. You must remake yourself, as Uncle Ho and Chairman Mao both said bourgeois intellectuals should do. The good news is that you show glimmers of collective revolutionary consciousness. The bad news is that your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite. You must write for the people!
You speak truthfully, sir, I said. The wood pigeon and manioc soup had begun dissolving in my stomach, their nutrients energizing my brain. I just wonder what you would say about Karl Marx, Comrade Commandant.
Das Kapital
isn’t exactly written for the people.
Marx did not write for the people? Suddenly I could see the darkness of the commandant’s cave through his magnified irises. Get out! See how bourgeois you are? A revolutionary humbles himself before Marx. Only a bourgeois compares himself to Marx. But rest assured,
he
will treat you for your elitism and Western inclinations. He has built a state-of-the-art examination room where he will personally supervise the final phase of your reeducation, when you are transformed from an American into a Vietnamese once more.
I’m not an American, sir, I said. If my confession reveals anything, isn’t it that I’m an anti-American? I must have said something outrageously humorous, for he actually laughed. The anti-American already includes the American, he said. Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer define ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese. You must try to be as well.
Respectfully speaking, sir, most of our countrymen do not think I am one of them.
All the more reason for you to work harder to prove that you are one of us. Obviously you think of yourself as one of us, at least sometimes, so you are making progress. I see you’ve finished eating. What did you think of the wood pigeon? I admitted that it was delicious. What if I told you that “wood pigeon” is only a euphemism? He watched me carefully as I looked again at the pile of little bones on my plate, sucked clean of every bit of meat and tendon. Regardless of what it was, I still longed for another serving. Some call this rat, but I prefer “field mouse,” he said. But it hardly matters, does it? Meat is meat, and we eat what we must. Do you know I once saw a dog eating the brains of our battalion doctor? Ugh. I don’t blame the dog. He was only eating the brains because the man’s intestines had already been eaten by his fellow dog. These are the kinds of things you see on the battlefield. But losing all those men was worth it. All the bombs dropped on us by those air pirates were not dropped on our homeland. Not to mention that we liberated the Laotians. That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.
Yes, Comrade Commandant.
Enough serious talk. He threw the jute cover back over the pickled baby. I just wanted to give you my personal congratulations on having finished the written phase of your reeducation, no matter how barely, in my opinion. You should be pleased with how far you’ve come, even if you should be critical yourself for the limitations so evident in your confession. As good a student as you are, you may yet become the dialectical materialist that the revolution needs you to be. Now, let us go meet the commissar. The commandant checked the time on his wristwatch, which also happened to have been my wristwatch.
He
is expecting us.
We descended from the commandant’s quarters and walked past the guard barracks to the stretch of flatland separating the two hills. My isolation cell was located here, one of a dozen brick ovens where we basted in our own juices and where the prisoners tapped messages on the walls with tin cups. They had developed a simple code for communicating, and it was not long before they taught it to me. Part of what they conveyed to me was how they held me in high regard. Much of my heroic reputation came from Bon, who often greeted me through my neighbors. He and they believed I was singled out for extended isolation because of my ardent republicanism and my Special Branch credentials. They blamed the commissar for my fate, for he was really the one in charge of the camp, as everyone, including the commandant, knew. My neighbors had seen the commissar up close during his weekly political lectures, and the sight was truly horrific. Some cursed him, taking delight in his suffering. But the facelessness compelled respect among others, the mark of his dedication and sacrifice, even if for a cause that the prisoners despised. The guards, too, spoke of the faceless commissar with mixed tones of horror, fear, and respect, but never mockery. A commissar must never be mocked, even among one’s peers, for one never knew when one of those peers might report such antirevolutionary thinking.
I understood the need for my temporary detention and marginal conditions, for the revolution must be vigilant, but what I could not understand, and what I hoped the commissar would explain, was why the guards feared
him
, and, more generally, why revolutionaries feared one another. Aren’t we all comrades? I asked the commandant at an earlier session. Yes, he said, but not all comrades have the same level of ideological consciousness. Although I am not thrilled at having to seek the commissar’s approval on certain matters, I also admit that
he
knows Marxist-Leninist theory and Ho Chi Minh Thought much better than I ever will. I’m not a scholar, but he is. Men like him are guiding us toward a truly classless society. But we haven’t eradicated all elements of antirevolutionary thinking, and we must not forgive antirevolutionary faults. We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. This is the lesson you must absorb by heart, which is why we give you so much time to achieve it.
Ascending the hill toward the commissar’s quarters, it seemed to me that I had already spent too much time learning that lesson. We stopped at the stairs leading up to his balcony, where the baby-faced guard and three other guards awaited. The commissar’s in charge of you now, the commandant said, inspecting me from head to toe with a frown. I’ll be frank.
He
sees much more potential in you than I do. You are addicted to the social evils of alcohol, prostitution, and yellow music. You write in an unacceptable, counterrevolutionary manner. You are responsible for the deaths of the Bru comrade and the Watchman. You failed even in undermining this movie that misrepresents and insults us. If it were only up to me, I’d send you to the fields for your final cure. And if things do not work out with the commissar, I still can. Remember that.
I will, I said. And, knowing that I had not yet escaped his power, I also said, Thank you, Comrade Commandant, for all you have done for me. I know I’ve seemed reactionary to you because of my confession, but please believe me when I say that I have learned much under your tutelage and criticism. (This, after all, was the truth.)